Faculty

Chair

Charles D Piot

Professor

I do research on contemporary culture and politics, as well as on histories of slavery and colonialism, in francophone West Africa. My first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999) attempted to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. My recent book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa ...

Professor

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products and the precarity of irregular workers. ...

Dean of Academic Affairs of Trinity College; Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology

Lee D. Baker is Dean of Academic Affairs of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He received his B.S. from Portland State University and doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. ...

Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies and Director, Center for African and African American Research

J. Lorand Matory is the Director of the Center for African and African American Research and Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He conducts field research in Brazil, Nigeria, Benin Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica and the US. Choice magazine named his Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion an Outstanding ...

Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women's Studies. Director of Graduate Studies

My work is concerned with subjectivity and power and draws on close to 25 years of work in Guatemala (over seven years in country). Specifically, I try to understand how complex social formations like nationalism, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intersect with violence and the state to produce people’s senses of identity. I began working in Guatemala in ...

William M. O'Barr, Ph.D. Northwestern 1969, is currently writing books about advertising and masculinity and about the history of legal anthropology. His extensive publications focus primarily on legal anthropology and include such concerns as law and politics in rural Africa, communication in trial courtrooms in America, and access to justice. His ...

Professor of Cultural Anthropology, History and Women's Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Irene Silverblatt researches the cultural dimensions of power. She studies how “race-thinking” and gender relations were integral to the making of the modern world as well as how historical memory has shaped feelings of national belonging and demands for universal rights. These interests are both historical and contemporary, and have taken Silverblatt to the Inca ...

Orin Starn is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History. He has wide-ranging interests including Latin America, Native North America, social movements and indigenous politics, the history of anthropology, activist anthropology, and, more recently, sports and society. His newest book, "The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and ...

I received my doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Washington in Seattle. My early research focused on the culture and politics of the ethnic borders in China. I have published on Marxist nationality theory in China, on ethnic and
indigenous revitalization in the post-Cold War global
order, on gender and ethnic representation, ...

Assistant Professor

Anne-Maria Makhulu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, ...

Laurie McIntosh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University. Professor McIntosh specializes in the anthropology of Europe, migration, critical race and gender studies, and film and visual studies. Her research explores the ethics and politics of immigrant integration ...

I am interested in connections between the body and its environments in urban India. My first book, Metabolic Living, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. As India becomes increasingly portrayed as the site of a shift from infectious to chronic disease burdens said to accompany economic development, my research explores the phenomenon ...

Lecturer

Kirk is the author of three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is the coeditor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and helps edit Duke University Press’s World Readers series. Her essay on Colombia and human rights appears in Human Rights and Conflict Resolution in Context: Colombia, Sierra ...

William T. Laprade Professor of History; Professor of Cultural Anthropology

My teaching responsibilities include European history, French history from the eighteenth century to the present, cultural theory (especially the joint methodological interests of historians and anthropologists). My research in the past has dealt with such issues as the social history of industrialization, comparative social history of the modern era, the history of emotions ...

Julie Tetel (Andresen) writes in the field of linguistic historiography, focusing on French, German, and American theories of language from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. She is the author of Linguistics in America 1769-1924: A Critical History (Routledge, 1990, paperback edition 1996). She is currently writing a manuscript ...

Director of the Study of Sexualities; Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology

My work contributes to the feminist ethnography of globalization by providing theoretically engaged descriptions of transnational sites and processes. My approach combines attention to political economy, critical studies of culture, and post-colonial critiques of Eurocentrism. I use long term fieldwork in Bangkok, Thailand to explore how sexuality, ...

Professor Emeriti

Ernestine Friedl, Ph.D. Columbia 1950, is a James B. Duke Professor Emerita. She taught at Wellesley College and Queens College of the City of New York before coming to Duke in 1973. She has been Visiting Professor at Harvard and Princeton Universities. She has edited the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Her major interests are in the anthropology ...